Tsar Bomba: Russia releases secret footage of the world’s biggest nuclear blast

For decades, footage of history’s most powerful nuclear weapon was kept top-secret. 

Now, Russia is offering a behind-the-scenes look at the moments leading up to the detonation of that hydrogen bomb, known officially as RDS-220 and informally as Tsar Bomba.

Russia tested Tsar Bomba over a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean on October 30, 1961 – during the height of a nuclear arms race with the US. The country declassified documentary footage of that explosion on August 20, in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Russian nuclear industry.

The 40-minute video, uploaded to YouTube, shows the explosion – a blast equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT. That makes it nearly 1,500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined. Russia reported that the flash could be seen from almost 1,000km away.

The video starts as the bomb is transported by rail to the detonation site. From there, viewers get a peek inside the giant weapon – though the documentary doesn’t divulge technical secrets about how the bomb was created, Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, told The New York Times.